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Let's Face It...We are Soooooo F$#^*$^*&ked!

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Howard Lindzon
December 03, 2008

Every generation thinks they had it the worst.

There is no doubt that my generation (I am 43 which 51 Canadian years at the moment and climbing fast) of White, Can/American, Jews has had it the EASIEST of all time. Buy a moonshot. Until this moment.

The 43 years of goodness now comes back to haunt my generation because we have no clue what real economic brutality is. We have read about it and watched it on television, but it is creeping closer to home every day.

We are in a state of utter chaos in global markets. We have outlier events occurring across multiple markets and there are no models. The shrinking world has come back to haunt us at precisely the wrong time.

This post is not about blame, it’s really too late to play that game. I truly don’t believe in the system at this point in time. You really need to hunker down and cut out the noise. Reduce expenses where you can and spend most of your time selling. Saving is not a dirty word if even just to prove you can do it for one or two months.

The government has clearly shown it’s hand. Inflate or die. If you believe reflation will happen, making big bets on equities and hard assets right now should be gigantic winners. The old textbook would say that reflation is a given. I am not in a betting mood these days.

At this point I have no other choice but to hope. I just won’t do it (hope) with equities in any large way. I will continue to bet on people in early stage businesses because it’s in my blood and I am an optimist.

The trend is so clearly down that betting against it other than for trading purposes is bad business. Betting on the trend as it goes south is just damn hard because I have never seen anything like it. So I mostly watch and tweet about things. Obnoxious to most of you, but is saving me a fortune.

I guess you could buy Microsoft which seems cheap, but than you would be betting on Steve Ballmer. I mean he is smart, he must be, he is running Microsoft. Here is what he had to say about the iphone a few years back:

$500 fully subsidized with a plan! I said that is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine…. Right now we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year, Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months, they’ll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace and let’s see…what’s the expression? Let’s see how the competition goes.”

–Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the iPhone, January 2007

Apple now has 16 plus percent of the smartphone market.

It’s not to pick on Ballmer, but he is of my generation and just does not seem to have any more of a clue than you or me and is running MICROSOFT!

PS – related, funnier posts:

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